The ‘dole-bludger’ myth can die now — the real cheats were highly paid public servants

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, a book drummed into a generation of sociology students, begins with a long description of a public execution in Paris in 1757. Such public celebrations of torture were fading, he thought, replaced by the cold, clipped hand of bureaucracy. Instead of public executions, the 19th century saw governments create prison systems with standardised cells and sentencing guidelines, professionalised prison wardens and schemes to “correct” the incarcerated. 

But while we no longer see the condemned broken on wheels in the town square, Foucault warned that a subtler violence remained. State bureaucracies became more powerful. Systems of administrative justice were no less damaging to those in their grasp, even if they no longer left physical marks on felons’ bodies. “As a result,” Foucault wrote, “justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice.”

I was reminded of Foucault’s warnings about the unaccountable power of government bureaucracies when reading Catherine Holmes’ eloquent final report of the robodebt royal commission. Long but gripping, written in crisp and mordant prose, the report lays out the gory details of one of the worst episodes in the history of Australian public administration. 

If you’ve missed the fuss about robodebt, the sorry story can be summed up quite quickly: government fraud against vulnerable people on a massive scale. 

Under ministers Scott Morrison and Marise Payne, a group of senior welfare bureaucrats drew up a plan to start levying welfare debts on citizens who had previously received welfare payments, based on government data. Services Australia worked up a crude algorithm. It took Australian Taxation Office data about employment income and “matched” it to histories of welfare payments. If the algorithm showed that a recipient had received a benefit when their income was too high, a debt would be raised. 

The onus would be on welfare recipients to prove they were innocent: if they couldn’t explain, or didn’t contact the department, they would simply be issued with a debt. Commercial debt collectors were engaged to harass victims. In September 2016, the system started to churn out 20,000 debt notices a week.

As was obvious from the very beginning, robodebt was inaccurate and unlawful: “a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals”, as Holmes writes in the report. Many of the debts were simple fictions: not just errors, but in fact deliberate falsifications, the result of an algorithm engineered to catch as many victims as possible. 

Robodebt would have required a legislative amendment to have been lawful, a fact that had been picked up by mid-level bureaucrats early on. Senior public servants simply went ahead with the scheme anyway, then colluded with their colleagues in a cover-up. Cabinet was misled. Crucial legal advice was disappeared. The Commonwealth ombudsman was lied to. Public service whistleblowers who spoke up were ignored or disciplined. Ordinary citizens who complained to the media found their personal details splashed across Coalition-friendly media outlets. 

In such a scandal, there is plenty of blame to go around. Holmes didn’t mince words. She handed down devastating remarks about key players, including the top public servants and the ministers they served. 

Holmes found that Morrison and Payne allowed cabinet to be misled when presenting the policy proposal for robodebt. She also “rejects as untrue” Morrison’s testimony at the commission that he was just following the department’s advice. Morrison knew what he was doing, Holmes argued: “he knew that entitlement for income support payments according to the legislation was worked out on the basis of actual fortnightly income”. 

Holmes found former Liberal frontbencher Alan Tudge’s disclosure of private and sensitive information of recipients complaining about their welfare debts to the media represented an “abuse” of his ministerial power: “all the more reprehensible in view of the power imbalance between the minister and the cohort of people upon whom it would reasonably be expected to have the most impact, many of whom were vulnerable and dependent”.

Holmes did not spare former government services minister Stuart Robert, who she found to have lied about the accuracy of robodebt in public statements, writing that “he was making statements of fact as to the accuracy of debts, citing statistics which he knew could not be right”.

A gaggle of senior public servants were also named, including Finn Pratt, Renée Leon and the now-infamous Kathryn Campbell. Most at risk is Mark Withnell, the public servant who wrote the brief that misled cabinet; his former boss, Malisa Golightly, also comes in for plenty of criticism. Holmes found that a trio of top Department of Social Services officers, led by former deputy secretary Serena Wilson, lied to the Commonwealth ombudsman as part of the cover-up. The ombudsman itself also failed, allowing itself to be fooled by Wilson and her subordinates. 

But the most important part of the final report is the initial section, where Holmes pointed to the culture of welfare bashing that has proved so politically advantageous for governments in the past 30 years.

“The policy direction set by Mr Morrison in the social services portfolio, which was publicly communicated by him, was one of ‘ensuring welfare integrity’,” Holmes writes. “The nature of that approach was coloured by notions of people who were ‘rorting the system’ and Mr Morrison’s presence as a ‘welfare cop on the beat’.”

These prejudices were wrong: welfare fraud is in fact a tiny problem, as the government’s own data showed. 

Talking to victims and to long-term robodebt campaigners over the weekend, many are disappointed at what they see as the royal commission’s relatively weak recommendations. La Trobe University scholar Darren O’Donovan, for instance, writes that “most of the recommendations impose a responsibility to change on the institutions who failed all the way through”. For their part, activists like Asher Wolfe pointed to the courage of the small group of people who spoke up against robodebt in 2016 and 2017, despite indifference or outright hostility from the media and governing classes.   

On a policy level, Holmes’ recommendations are also disappointing. If robodebt has shown anything, it has proved the bankruptcy of “mutual obligation”, the policy of demanding welfare recipients meet stringent conditions in return for receiving most payments. The royal commission showed once and for all that mutual obligation is a lie: there is plenty of obligation, but no mutuality. Holmes could have said more about this overarching failure.  

Social security law enshrines the entitlement of all eligible Australians to benefit payments, but beyond the legalities is the moral question of why so many powerful people thought it was okay to break the law in order to skim from the vulnerable.

The answer is that for many in our governing classes, those seeking help from the government are cheats, scroungers or guilty of personal weakness. The neatness of the robodebt algorithm was that it did away with the niceties of due process — or even accurate accounting — and simply assumed that welfare recipients were cheating. But the real cheats, it turned out, were the highly paid ministers and public servants.   

The recommendations are stronger on process. Robodebt exposes the ethical corruption of Australia’s public service, in the pursuit of political gain for ministers, and fat pay packets and shiny baubles for the SES crowd. Senior public servants lied and cheated to punish the needy, because that’s what their ministers wanted. In return, Kathryn Campbell earned nearly $1 million a year, not to mention Order of Australia honours. It will be fascinating to see if figures like Campbell and Wilson face consequences for their parts in this scandal. 

As for Morrison? He has regressed further into his post-truth universe.

“I reject completely each of the findings which are critical of my involvement in authorising the scheme and are adverse to me,” Morrison claimed in a statement. “They are wrong, unsubstantiated and contradicted by clear documentary evidence presented to the commission.”

In many ways, it was the perfect Morrison response: a flat denial, despite the weight of evidence presented to a royal commission and formally summarised by the commissioner, followed by an attack on the integrity of the commission process. 

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the robodebt denouement has been the reaction of Liberal Leader Peter Dutton. Dutton appears not to have even bothered to read the report that found he was misled in cabinet by Morrison and Payne. Instead, Dutton attacked the commission itself as politicised, and defended Morrison’s po-faced denial of its findings. 

This points to a broader truth: austerity is too tempting a weapon for conservative and centrist politicians to eschew. It seems that even a royal commission won’t disarm the punishment of the vulnerable, especially if there are friendly media outfits all too willing to carry stories about welfare cheats and bludgers.  

Will we see the end of the “welfare cheat” myth? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.